NEWS of a revolution in arts education reaches me from a little-known
college on the eastern American seaboard. According to the Associated
Press, students at East Connecticut State University who infringe
campus rules are being forced to attend a classical concert or
opera by way of punishment and absolution.

More than 50 freshmen and sophomores have suffered the penalty
so far, and faculty members who originally opposed the disciplinary
procedure have come round to support it, recognising that it
is doing the youngsters some good.

The lightest sentence is watching a production of Tosca. This
is presumably inflicted on first offenders who were late with
essays or caught drinking in the dorms. The real hard cases,
plagiarists and pot-smokers, will perhaps have to be exposed
to a full Ring before federal inspectors can tell with empirical
certainty whether the experiment has worked.

The wizards of Willimantic, leafy home of ECSU, are convinced
of its efficacy. Their website promises "an education for
a new century", and their dean must imagine that he has
come up with the best form of remedial treatment since chain-gangs.

There is something appallingly appealing about the notion
of being chastised with culture. Who among us would object to
being sent to Devil's Island for a few years, if we could take
the contents of the British Library and the National Institute
of Recorded Sound?

But the thrust of the Willimantic Alternate Restitution Program
(WARP for short) is founded on a dangerous misconception: the
notion that high art is, like jogging, painful at first but probably
good for you in the long run. Artists themselves are not immune
to this delusion. Wagner, when he stacked Bayreuth with wooden
benches, did not intend his customers to have a comfortable night
out. Close to the heart of most modern art lies an ascetic artery
of purification-by-pain.

The writer Brian Kellow, in the current issue of Opera, describes
how when he first visited the Met he was more nervous after a
four-hour Rosenkavalier than before, because courtesy required
him to say something about the performance and he didn't yet
know what, if anything, he felt. He went on to become a professional
critic and earn a living from his torment, but many non-critics
pass their opera nights in a similiar ecstasy of post-curtain
anguish and embarrassment. No pain, no gain.

I recall from my own childhood piano lessons and opera matinees
an adult expectation of faked gratitude on my part, founded on
the assumption that I could not possibly be enjoying myself.
Music at school was designed to be endured.

The notion that art must be arduous before it can be enjoyed
is a late-Romantic fabrication of dubious provenance. Bach did
not make his audiences share the agonies in his Passions. Chopin
evoked pathos and rage without hurting sensitive ears. Mozart's
highest praise for a piece of music was that "it flowed
like oil". Art by duress was alien to the early masters
and entered the canon only when composers sought to impose the
mastery of their ideologies.

Inflicting art by force is tantamount to brainwashing. And
as for the WARP idea that music makes better citizens, history
teaches otherwise. Hitler was a devout Wagnerian, Mussolini was
an avid violinist, and the best pianist ever to occupy the White
House was Harry S. Truman, who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. What good did music do in them?

I get letters, from time to time, from prisoners who discover
Radio 3 in the nick and consider themselves redeemed. I hate
to tell them that music has no morally improving quality. It
is a neutral gift, like water. In moderation, it raises crops
and quenches thirst. In excess, it ruins property and lives.
Music is what we make of it, pure and simple.

Which is why I get worried when scientists claim to be "doing"
things with music, whether increasing child IQs on a diet of
Mozart or turning college cheerleaders into Stepford wives by
threatening them with Puccini. Music, in the hands of mad boffins,
is a misguided weapon of incalculable force.

But let's not mock the warpers of Connecticut. The question
of whether good music is good for you sits at the centre of the
debate over state subsidy and public broadcasting. Britain, the
last European state to begin supporting the arts, did so in 1945
because Maynard Keynes argued that publicly funded art would
create a better society. Whether he was right or not is immaterial.
The interventionist case is unsustainable in the 21st century's
plethora of choice.

The arts need to define a better case for public subsidy than
the eroding Keynesian and Reithian formulae. Let us accept that
music has no improving qualities, unless the listener is predisposed
to self-improvement. But let us also recognise that music is
an essential utility, again like water, and should be supplied
on tap for all to make of it what they will.